For my show I will have active Aurasma triggers within the space, so I needed to come up with a beautiful graphic to inform the viewer that here is not only a graphic, or photo, but an experience.

Using my line drawings and full colour Great Bustard illustrations and placing them so they appear to come out of the mobile devices screen in colour, gives the visual clue as to what you can hope to see.

Working on the next step I decided to illustrate the Bustards movements, so that I can easily align and check the movement before creating the final handdrawn pieces. I applied my usual style with illustrated graphics to the images of the Bustard that are my keyframes and as with a lot of the stuff that I do like this, I really like the way the wireframe looks – the way the outline looks before I fill it in.

I work in a particular way, as with my rotoscoped film, I have my base image/footage and draw the outline quickly and fluidly using my tablet and wacom pen, it’s like second nature to me now, but I draw the shapes with a view to what I will then fill them with and the order they sit in my layers to give a sense of depth.

So here is how they turned out.. I really like them and now I can use those wireframes to perfectly align the bodies and eyes to make a convincing bird in flight animation. This illustrated style will be used in the AR part of my installation and on the printed materials.

Reviewing the footage late last night, I really wanted to have another go at 3D motion tracking, I had the inspirational idea that I would like to put the title of the film, ‘Just one more place to look’ within the scenes themselves and for the character to walk past them, so have spent all morning, trying to make this work.

In After effects there are many ways of tracking, you can track the motion, the camera, or 3D track either, so I have gone through each of the parameters to attempt to track the background live action scenes in my film, I started with the rotoscoped section, but AE couldn’t even start to analyze that and then brought the original live action sections into AE, thinking that would be better, but although it can track in 2D, I’m mostly doing that by hand, and the 3D doesn’t get it at all… see screen below for what I’ve been seeing all morning!

But still wanting to add the title of the film and to get some more motion tracking in, I decided to hand track the final fade out and put the title at the end.

This is again reinforcing the cyclic nature of the endless walking, round and round, with the perpetual ‘one more place to look’ motto for my main character, I think it’s an improvement on the original, but this is where another crit would have come in handy!

….and no Youtube I would not like you to stabilise my shaky footage – it’s supposed to be like that!

I have spoken quite often about the technique I used for the illustrative animation style in my ASU1 film roughly titled ‘just one more place to look’ , I work on a wacom tablet, and have done for years, as this gives an intuitive and freehand feel to any kind of graphics that I might create, many years ago when I first used illustrator I remember struggling with the anchor points and the vector pen tool, but now it’s almost as if I am drawing with a pencil.

Whilst on my BA degree course I did a lot of life drawing and my favourite technique was just picking two colours from my oil pastels to denote the planes of the figure in front of me and I was so successful at this, one of the examiners asked why I was doing animation when he thought my life drawing was the star of my degree show.

Now with these many years of the above techniques under my belt I can very quickly interpret figures into coloured planes with a highly stylized and effective result.

these images were created to show the diversity of courses at City College for a poster campaign and show my technique at it’s best, not photographic, but recognisable with a style all of their own.

This is where the look for my animated character in the film originated and throughout the 1286 hand-drawn frames I tried to make each and everyone as a beautiful ‘cel’ in it’s own right.

A still from the market scene.

Still from the church walk section.

Still from the slope rotoscope section.

Still from the subway section.

Above is a screenshot of some of the hundreds of thumbnails I produced.

A bit more work brings me to this which is closer to what I want, the colour is there, the information band, I think I’d like to put a QR code in here as well to use as a tool to alert people to modern interaction, the white and dark castle logo is back, much better clarity and is more eye catching.

I see this as being no bigger than 2 feet across, vinyl print applied to lino, (for testing) obviously if it was to be brought in as apiece for the museum it would be a vinyl graphic directly adhered to their floor.

I have also sourced some Easy Peel media which I will be using for this test from a company called Antalis http://www.antalis.co.uk/business/home.htm whom I have spoken to and they are sending out a sample pack (yay free!), including both clear and white peelable media which should include enough sheets for my experimentation…

Working on from the first trigger image set, I wanted to try and encapsulate the animal icon within the four walls of the castle’s own logo, so i drew the crenelations and mirrored them to form a squashed, but open, square . This made a very visually pleasing and balanced shape and this could definitely be used to roll out AR to other animals, or exhibits by simple replacing the centre silhouette.

I like the black and white feel, but it has strayed, perhaps, too far from the Castle Museum’s own identity, and I also want to encircle this with a band of information somehow, so even if you haven’t got a device, you know what this floor graphic is all about… So it becomes synonymous with an AR experience in the Norwich castle Museum.